“Isaac Sowed in a Time of Famine” (Genesis 26 V1-17)
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“Isaac sowed in a time of famine” (Genesis 26 v1-17) If you’ve been in EBCG for a while, you’ll know that around this time of year we usually study a character from the Older Testament: if you’ve got good memories you may recollect (working backwards) Elisha, Abraham, Joshua, David, Joseph, Elijah, Moses and Nehemiah. Even though each of their contexts was so different from ours, and also that none of them had a living relationship with God the Father through His Son Jesus, they can all still be a great inspiration to our faith. That magnificent chapter on the heroes of faith, Hebrews 11, begins by saying “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients (the men of old) were commended for” So over the next few weeks we’re going to look at two more characters from the Older Testament, members of a famous trio who were frequently referenced together, not only in the Older but also the Newer Testament, as in these words of Peter in Acts 3 when he gave his defense of the healing of the crippled beggar saying “Men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus” (v12-13). The connecting of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, linked this glorifying of Jesus through the healing, back to the historic faith of Israel. The trio were the anchor points of where it had all come from for those Jewish men who were listening to Peter, as they should equally be for we who also love the God of Israel - because the God of the newer Testament is the exact same God of the older Testament. Though the sending of His one and only Son to be the Saviour of the world marked Him for ever, it still didn’t change who He is. So the God we love and serve is the very same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Which is why it’s then good to know something about each of the three of them, and what their knowing of God meant to them. Now Abraham often gets spoken about, as he was by two weeks ago by Joshua Turnil. It’s not surprising as Abraham gets a full 15 chapters in Genesis and is second only to Moses for references in the Newer Testament. If you’d like to remind yourself of the series we did on Abraham, then just click on the website sermons for October 2010. But we know much less about Jacob, and even less about Isaac, who apart from his narrow escape with his life when Abraham almost sacrificed him, only gets one solid chapter to himself, which comes in Genesis 26. So we’ll look at Isaac this week and then move on to Jacob next week. But my hope is that the message we’re going to draw from Isaac is one that you will not move on from quickly, nor will we will as a church, because as we think about how Isaac sowed in a time of famine, and reaped abundantly as a result, we’ll see how this relates to a very specific situation in our church. Let’s read Genesis 26 v1-17 So where we meet up with Isaac is in the land of Gerar, where he was living nomadically. Hebrews 11 v9 speaks of how his father Abraham “By faith made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country, he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise” It was not that Isaac could only afford a tent: he was very wealthy, most likely even owning a significant amount of land, because when Abraham died we’re told in verse 5 of the previous chapter that “Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac”. So it was his choice to live as he did as a nomad, and in Hebrews 11 Isaac gets included under the same character of his father Abraham as “looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God”. He also gets put in the group about which it was said “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking about the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead they were looking for a better country – a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them” (v13-16) So when we identify with the God of Israel, we identify with the God of 3 nomadic expatriates, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It’s very appropriate, because there’s a calling to every believer to live as a spiritual expatriate – Peter’s first epistle opens with the words “To God’s elect, strangers in the world”(1 Peter 1 v1) – our calling is to sit light on the things of this world, to have our treasure in heaven rather than on earth, and to have a flexibility and availability to God for whatever he might ask of us. So if we’re serious about walking forwards with God, it’s not long before we start learning about what it means in practice, “letting go and letting God”. This can touch all sorts of things in us as we start to learn about what relinquishment for the Lord can mean for real. But for all we who are also doing expatriate life physically as well as spiritually, there’s a particular resonance about these words in Hebrews 11 about living as “aliens and strangers”. And if it does, we’re then in good company with Isaac was living it out just like Abraham had. Isaac was evidently a chip off the old block in a number of ways, not least in the way he repeated the lie that Abraham had made about Sarah only being his sister when actually she was his wife, Isaac who saying the same thing to King Abimelech about his wife Rebekah, and only just getting out of the fix his lie might have caused by the skin of his teeth. It’s a telling picture of how both the strengths and the weaknesses of parental example can be passed from one generation to another. But on the upside, what Isaac had taken on from his father Abraham, and which he passed on to Jacob was, notwithstanding his wealth, a nomadic lifestyle, with all the insecurities and uncertainties it involves, and also all the opportunities and availabilities it brings. As it did for the hobbit called Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. You may remember how Frodo’s told he must leave his comfortable home in the Shire and travel to a distant land. When the initial shock wears off, he comments “Of course, I have sometimes thought about going away, but I imagined that as a kind of holiday, a series of adventures, ending in peace. But this would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger … As for where I am going, it would be difficult to give that away, for I have no clear idea for myself, yet … where am I to go? And by what shall I steer? What is to be my quest? … I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well – very desperate” At least some of us will recognize exactly how Frodo felt, because we’ve gone through a similar experience, which may not even be resolved for us yet. But in addition to our personal experience, we’ve most likely have also observed what’s gone on for others who’ve become expatriates. We’ll have seen how some became expatriates having got sent away from home because of the decisions of others. Maybe because of parents moving, or because an employer thought it would be such a great idea to move us from here to there. For others it’s because of our own intentional choice. Either for positive reasons, as we looked for adventure or opportunity. Or for negative reasons, perhaps to get away from something or someone we wanted to be free from. For others it sort of happened by accident: we only came for 3 months but that was now many years ago. There’s many reasons why people become expatriates, and with those many reasons come many consequences as well, not just for us, but for our children and maybe their children as well, as well as for those we leave behind, like for my great grand-parents who in 1920 watched my grand-parents set off to live in China with my mother and her two sisters and brother, apparently never to return. Quite something in those days. But amidst all the ups and downs of expatriate life of the physical sort, for believers there’s the opportunity to experience and honour God’s leading in it all that it throws up. Which is what happened for Isaac when famine hit the land of Gerar in which he was.